I don't really care that it's officially summer. I no longer live on the academic calendar. Summer doesn't mean lazy days of watching morning news programs and 3-2-1 Contact. Summer doesn't mean fixing myself a lunch of Spaghetti-O's and wondering if I can get someone's mom to drive me to the pool. Summer doesn't mean much of anything to me now. It means my office will be hotter. And I will get a few more freckles. And I will have to start running earlier in the day if I don't want to develop some form of Hollywood asthma. If anything, the advent of summer just makes me bitter and envious that other people are planning trips and buying vacation packages and packing things in a cooler and hitting the road. I want to be going somewhere. I want to be having an adventure. I'm due.

Ironically, the first day of summer in Los Angeles was -- at least for me -- a gloomy, hazy, chilly day with little in the way of motivation and much in the way of annoyance. But, I have a party to go to. Maybe that will shore things up. (Between you and me, I doubt it will, but I like to give the impression of hopeful optimism to people who don't know me that well.)

I bought some nice things at Banana Republic today. And I wore pants that look nice on my fanny. And I had a hot dog at a hot dog cart for lunch. That sounds nice, doesn't it? Leave out the part where the hot dog was rolled by the wind and lost all it's sauerkraut and other colorful dressings. And the part where the seemingly endless twists and turns of the two parking garages that had to be navigated made me full-tilt nauseous. With those exceptions, it was as nice as it sounds. I should go shopping at lunch more often. It makes me happy.

So, it's the first day of summer. Mark it. When it's the first day of autumn, you can look back with me and we can marvel together at how little we've managed to do in the interim. Or we could rail against that fate and spend the coming few months building elaborate cities out of popsicle sticks, submitting sweepstakes entries, and avoiding the law. Then, come autumn, we can write our memoirs and sell them for a MINT! That way, next summer, we'll be able to afford to take a nice trip somewhere and have done with all this bellyaching.